woensdag 31 december 2008

After reading the book cradle to cradle I started thinking what we can do in IT about reducing our C02 footprint. People start to realize that IT is consuming some 5% of our energy consumption nowadays. So all hardware companies start thinking about how to improve the energy consumption of servers. This improvement is only aimed at the run time component of the application execution.At design time, the question can be raised, can we make our programming greener?I started programming in the late 80's, where I've learned to program to avoid memory usage (ok that lead us into the 2000 problem...), and optimize the program to run as smooth as possible with the scarce resources in mind.With the ever increasing speed of processors, we are spoiled and tend to program sloppy nowadays, who cares about extra loop cycles, just add an extra processor.Actually when we look nowadays at the 'size' of an application, the term SLOC (Source Lines of Code) is used. In short, instead of measuring the effectiveness of an application, we only look at the size, so size really matters.... Let's go back to the drawing table start thinking about programming again, how can we make our applications more efficient in the usage of resources?

I think green management of an application should be part of the design and run phase, and should already be added in the offerings we bring to our clients. Cars have an energy level, so why don't we green label our applications?

woensdag 17 december 2008

Once in a while there something which really makes you tick. Six months ago I went out to do some running, it went bad, so at the end I was in a bad mood. When I wanted to drive back, the road was blocked by birdwatchers, but even though I like bird watching, I was annoyed by them and didn't care about the bird they were looking at. Back home I checked a bird watcher site and realised that it was about a Crane (grus grus), a very rare bird in The Netherlands. I went back but then, of course the crane was gone. Slowly I started getting the crane fever. I started studying web material and books. The biggest chance of spotting one is in the migrating season, from October to December, but when you study the statistics, Cranes are spotted in peaks, hundreds to thousands in one day and zero the day after, and mostly in the south and east of The Netherlands, not my region...So I kept an eye on the spotting sites, and went out hiking, but apart from a nice walk, no result.The last week however a Crane was spotted in the Rosmalen region, so I took a 'sebatical afternoon' and went out looking. And fortunately luck was with me, so the Quest for the Crane was completed. In the picture above it is the beautifull purple bird in the middle.